JULIAN SCHNABEL

PROFILEJulian Schnabel is a visual artist who first achieved prominence as a trendy, jet-setting painter and sculptor during the art-buying frenzy of the 1980s. Schnabel became a leading figure of "neo-expressionism," a movement that rebelled against the cool minimalism of modernist art. Schnabel's social life--his friendships with rock stars, actors and wealthy socialites--attracted as much media attention as his paintings, however. His work appears in private and public collections of the world's leading museums which includes New York's Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou, London's Tate Gallery and The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He recently turned his artistic focus to film writing and directing.

Julian Schnabel makes his directorial debut in this portrayal of the short and tragic life of graffiti artist Jean Michael Basquiat whose work was found all over New York City under the name "SAMO." The film focuses on Basquiat's meteoric rise from a penniless artist to a star within the New York art scene and the exploitative forces that eventually led to his death from a drug overdose.

"We see the groupies and the poseurs, the greedy art dealers, the Eurotrash night owls, and the spoiled ostentatious yuppies who don't know what they're collecting. And we wonder: In a world so false, how could anyone--especially someone who scrawled graffiti and slept in a cardboard box one day, and was hailed as the nation's top black painter the next--hold a sense of proportion?" - Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle